The Epic Struggle of Martin
Scorsese

part 2

To help his cause, Scorsese cast Leonardo DiCaprio
as a rebellious kid with the unlikely name of Amsterdam Vallon, who returns to
New York City after several years in prison. His intent is to avenge the death
of his father - while helping the burgeoning Irish-immigrant population carve
out its turf in the city.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays his father's murderer, Bill
the Butcher, who is head of a fiercely anti-immigrant faction and who is a key
part of the city's unruly power structure. Cameron Diaz plays Jenny Everdeane, a
pickpocket who tries to operate independently of the gangs and, as a result,
attracts Amsterdam's attention. Scorsese tells me he has decided to shoot most
scenes in a surreal, smoky haze but it's a look suggesting science fiction more
than period. Working with Michael Ballhaus, his accomplished cinematographer,
Scorsese wants Gangs to seem more akin to Satyricon than to
pre-Civil War reality, to represent the exotic rather than a history lesson.
Perhaps it is appropriate that on the Cinecittą lot, the diminutive Scorsese is
working out of a vast, ornate office once occupied by Fellini.

Given the tight security on the set, the Italian
press has percolated with wild rumors. At different times, Leonardo was said to
have ballooned to pudgy proportions and to be balking at the rigid diet imposed
by Harvey Weinstein. Writers were fretfully patching the script at the same time
Scorsese was quarreling with Weinstein over the changes.

If any of this was true, I didn't see signs of it
when I was there. Leonardo was thin as a rod, the script seemed in good order,
and Scorsese appeared to be on relatively genial terms with Weinstein, his
rotund, blunt-spoken Medici, as though acknowledging that only Miramax would
have had the stomach for this ambitious production.

Indeed, it was Harvey Weinstein's eleventh-hour
intervention that saved Gangs from yet another descent into development
hell, even with DiCaprio attached. The young superstar had committed to the
project on the eve of his departure for Thailand to start filming The
Beach. This gave Yorn and Ovitz some breathing room in which to secure
financing and distribution.

They would need it. Among all their casting and
production problems, they faced a troublesome suit over the production credits.
Though Scorsese had been working on various drafts of the scripts for three
decades, a distinguished Italian producer, Alberto Grimaldi, claimed he had come
up with the idea and had even set it up once at Universal. He filed a suit to
obtain a producer credit and didn't want to share it with Scorsese. (He was
ultimately awarded more than $3 million by the Federal District Court in New
York)

And there was a further complication. Although
Scorsese had independently elicited keen interest in his project from Joe Roth,
then chairman of Walt Disney Picture, the filmmaker contractually owed his next
project to Warner Bros.

Eager to sort this out, Yorn arranged a summit
meeting with the then cohead of Warner Bros., Terry Semel, in early 1999.
Surely, Yorn suggested, some sort of cofinancing deal could be hammered out
between Warner Bros. and Disney, thus allowing them to share the film. The
meeting kept growing in size, as each side brought along its deal makers and
consiglieri.

"Marty opened the meeting with a brilliant pitch
of the story," Yorn recalls. "Listening to him, I couldn't see how any studio
could resist." Terry Semel, however, was not similarly transported. Indeed, it
soon became clear that Semel's real objective was not to make a deal for
Gangs but, rather, to nudge Scorsese into directing Dino, a biopic
about Dean Martin with Tom Hanks playing the lead.

Outraged by Semel's play, Yorn was further
disturbed by rumors that Joe Roth, his lone Gangs supporter, might now be
leaving Disney. What's more, Roth's boss, Michael Eisner, the head of Walt
Disney, could not be counted on for help. The Columbine High School massacre
that spring had shaken Eisner, who'd always been zealously protective of the
Disney image. Eisner felt this was not the time to make a violent-youth movie.
Yorn tried taking Gangs to other studios, but both MGM and 20th Century
Fox passed. It was beginning to look as though Gangs curse would again
take its toll.

Enter Harvey Weinstein. At a celebrity auction to
benefit film preservation held at Manhattan's Planet Hollywood in late 1999 (at
which one of the items up for bid was a Raging Bull poster), the Miramax
boss approached Scorsese to say he's heard about Gangs and wanted in.
Scorsese was startled; Miramax, after all, was a division of Disney. Further,
Miramax had traditionally specialized in relatively low-budget films and could
thus put up only a portion of the money. But at least it was a start. The
remainder was about magically appear from yet another unlikely source - Graham
King, a burly Brit who had made his money shopping European TV shows. Given his
appetite to expand into film, King liked the look of a star vehicle like
Gangs, sensing that the Scorsese-DiCaprio combination would whet the
appetites of Europe's cash-rich TV stations that needed glitzy film packages. So
between King and Weinstein, plus a residual commitment from Touchstone, another
Disney subsidiary, the funding suddenly took shape to make Gangs a
reality. The deal represented a surprise triumph not only for Scorsese but also
for Ovitz and Yorn, who were eager to project the credibility of their new
entity.

Their celebration, however, would prove
short-lived. No sooner had the deal seemed set than they received word that
Harvey Weinstein had contracted a mysterious bacterial infection, one that would
sideline him, perhaps for months. Without Harvey's direct support, surely a
megaproject like Gangs would never come together, especially since
Miramax was now being run by Harvey's brother, Bob, a man whose claim to fame
was low-budget horror films such as Scream. To Yorn's irritation rumors
were spreading that both DiCaprio and Scorsese were looking for other films.

In fact reporters for Daily Variety were
receiving fervid "tips" that DiCaprio was about to commit two other projects
with firm start dates. Inevitably, Yorn suspected that agents at Creative
Artists Agency were coaxing along this blizzard of rumors. CAA had recently
declared war on Ovitz, charging that its founder was stealing clients for his
management company - Robin Williams was presumably a prime example. Ovitz denied
these accusations, arguing that most of his management clients continued to
employ the services of agents, albeit not many at CAA. The rivalry continued to
fester, however, and so did the rumormongering over Gangs.

Amid all this static, Yorn was thrilled to receive
a surprise call from Bob Weinstein, the cochairman of Miramax was still
committed to making Gangs despite Harvey's illness. The green light was
flashing, Bob advised, provided the cast could be rounded out and the script
locked.

So with DiCaprio in place, Scorsese focused on
nailing down the role of the movie's heavy, Bill the Butcher. Scorsese's
instinct, not surprisingly, favored Robert De Niro, with whom he had made eight
films. Their friendship had been enhanced by hits such as Raging Bull but
had also endured flops such as New York, New York. "They function more
like brothers than like director and actor," says one man who has worked at
their side. "They build a performance together, one anticipating the reaction of
the other. De Niro is not the most verbal of actors, but they communicate on gut
instinct."

Scorsese gave De Niro the script, confident he'd
accept. But De Niro opted to pass, reportedly because he was unable to relate to
the character. Those associated with the movie have offered a different spin:
"Let's just say De Niro didn't want to spend months away from New York at this
moment in his life," says one Miramax executive.

With De Niro out of contention, however, Scorsese
had to scramble. He set his sights on another actor whose work and attitude he
greatly admired - Daniel Day-Lewis. They'd collaborated on The Age of
Innocence, and Scorsese had watched him lose himself so completely in his
role that his identity all but disappeared. It was a familiar pattern. While
filming The Crucible, Day-Lewis, who holds both Irish and English
passports, traveled early to film location to construct with his own hands the
house that his character was supposed to live in. Four years ago, Day-Lewis
topped even this: After he announced that he'd lost interest in acting, he moved
to Florence to apprentice himself to a master shoemaker.

Would the eccentric star now give up his career as
a cobbler? Scorsese contacted him and sent him a script.

An old hand at roping in reticent actors, Scorsese
managed to persuade Day-Lewis to fly to New York. He then marshaled DiCaprio to
join him and Day-Lewis at meeting to discuss their roles. Leo was now consulting
regularly on the script and felt more and more like a surrogate producer. So did
a now healthy Harvey Weinstein, who orchestrated an extraordinary dinner for
Scorsese, Day-Lewis, DiCaprio and himself at a Harlem restaurant known to be
frequented by hoods and him men. To ensure an appropriate atmosphere, Weinstein
even phoned the owner and told him to spread the word about his visitor. "I
wanted to get the real shooter there," Weinstein noted. "I wanted Daniel Day to
see what 'the boys' looked like - the real ones."

Even as Harvey Weinstein paced their set, joked
with the actors and teased them about their ragged wardrobes, a bystander could
chart his occasional worried glances. For it was the rotund, ever garrulous
Miramax chief who bore the full burden of the venture.

Whether or not this act of showmanship impressed
the shy actor is not known, but after they met several more times with
Day-Lewis, his resistance melted; he agreed to set aside his shoemaking career,
travel to Rome and throw himself into the part of Bill the Butcher.

To be sure, the actors - Day-Lewis, DiCaprio, Diaz
and the others - did not have to concern themselves with the risks inherent in
the subject matter. Like most actors, they were reacting to their specific roles
to the director's mystique, to their lines of dialogue, to the dramatic riffs
that they would pull off together. But even as the frenetic Harvey Weinstein
paced their set, joked with them between setups and teased them about their
ragged wardrobes, a bystander could chart his occasional worried glances, his
furrowed brow. For it was the rotund, ever garrulous Miramax chief who bore the
full burden of the venture. He has willed into existence an enormously expensive
and controversial movie that dealt with a distant blur on America's time clock,
an era when a curious ethnic underworld ruled New York and when the entire city
was ultimately convulsed by rioting mobs opposed to the draft.

To succeed, Gangs of New York will have to
be more than an art picture. After all, art pictures don't boast budgets of (at
least) $85 million. (By the third week, the production was falling behind
schedule.) Besides, as Harvey Weinstein knows all too well, the audience for art
movies is rapidly dwindling in the United States.

For whatever reason, the mass audience seems to
want "event" movies such as The Perfect Storm or lowbrow comedies such as
Meet the Parents. Miramax rose to its present lofty status with offbeat
films such as The Crying Game and The English Patient, yet no one
else seems to be making similar films, and even Miramax is struggling to regain
its impetus.

Despite his reputation as a rough-and-tumble
negotiator, Harvey Weinstein has gained renown for his exuberant love of films
and also for his extraordinary savvy about the medium. He can talk for hours
about Truffaut and Godardi a feat his Hollywood brethren certainly cannot match.
Even Miramax's biggest critics grudgingly admire Harvey Weinstein while
privately predicting his ultimate decline. "He can't sustain it" is the common
cry.

And Gangs of New York is perhaps the
crucial turning point. Will it ass to Harvey's luster or contribute to his
downfall? Will he live to regret picking up the yellowed, thirty-year-old
screenplay that Martin Scorsese had so long savored?

Martin Scorsese was clearly thrilled to cry
"Action." But will Harvey yearn to yell "Cut"?

GQ writer-at-large Peter Bart is the
editor in chief of Variety and Daily Variety.

*

Thanks a lot to Ann who scanned
the whole article and to Pitssymoon from Omni
Leonardo for typing it
!